by Jane Arbor
‘Not?’ Barbara queried. ‘I understood you were taking over from where Tina left off.’
‘But not permanently. Only until Mr. Napier finds someone else to suit him.’
Barbara laughed shortly. ‘Which could take longer than you’d think. Craig has a way with men—he practically never loses an estate hand to any other plantation. But his secretaries seem to come and go. When he fired the last one before Tina—an American girl—she told him he needed a robot, not a flesh-and-blood person with feelings.’
(And from his threat to me, perhaps she had something there, thought Hope). ‘What did he say to that?’ she asked.
‘I gather he complimented her on the suggestion, and told her that when robots came on to the agency markets, he’d be the first in the queue for one.’
‘And then he got Tina!’
Barbara agreed, ‘As you say, he got Tina. But when he applied to your chief in London, he hoped to get someone like you.’
‘So he’s said to me today, though I didn’t quite believe him.’
True, I assure you,’ Barbara nodded. ‘He told me so himself.’
‘Why, how did he describe me?’ asked Hope, curious against her will.
Barbara hesitated. ‘Well—can you take this, I wonder? He said you’d sounded on the telephone like a plain jane with her head screwed firmly on—’
‘He said more or less the same to my face today,’ put in Hope.
‘—But that you had a voice that he could bear to hear reciting the telephone directory any time,’ finished Barbara.
‘Oh—!’ said Hope, pleased, though she didn’t know why.
The next morning she woke before it was fully light and was surprised to hear Barbara already moving about. They had gone to bed early—Barbara had said that, except on gala nights or after parties, people tended to in the tropics where night and day hours were equal—and evidently they kept early morning hours too.
But after a time all was silent again; Hope fell asleep, and when she got up and dressed a couple of hours later she found Barbara on the verandah with papers and a typewriter on the garden table before her. She hoped she hadn’t disturbed her, she told Hope, but she liked to work in the morning hours before breakfast, and when they had had that, they would follow Craig’s suggestion and she would show Hope around in her jalopy of a car.
This morning the sky was a clear blue, the air scarcely ruffled by a breeze. They ate on the verandah and Hope had her first fascinated sight of a humming-bird, heard the chatter of tree-frogs, and marvelled that a November sun could possibly be so warm and November flowers so riotously gay.
Over the meal Barbara talked about her work, saying that Creole patois derived from both French and English, bat as it had no literature and was rarely written, any translation of it had to be by phonetic comparisons with French and English words. It had dropped several letters of the alphabet, had turned the French ‘r’ into a ‘w’ sound and was a lazy language, in that it managed without many of the French and English grammatical forms.
‘Do you speak it well yourself?’ asked Hope.
‘Enough to understand it and make myself understood, just as most Madeninans speak English or French, though they use Creole among themselves. When I’m in difficulties with words or constructions—I’m making the dictionary a simple grammar book too—I go to Madeninan friends for help. And Craig is collecting proverbs for my glossary of Creole maxims which are fun and can be very apt,’ said Barbara.
‘Quote some.’
‘Well, if someone is late, what about—“U deye ko de talo”—“You are as far behind as two heels”? Or—“Piti has ka-bat gwo bwa”—“A little axe can cut big trees”? Not much English to either of them, except “has” for axe, but there’s a touch of the French “talon” in “talo”, and of petit in “piti”, isn’t there?’ As she began to clear away the breakfast things, Barbara concluded, ‘Nelson used to collect a lot of words and sayings from children. They loved showing off all they knew and he didn’t, and I remember the day he and Roland went out for—for the last time, he brought a new one to me which meant—“Good wind; good current; calm sea; let’s sail!”—and then he didn’t come back.’
‘Doesn’t it hurt, remembering that?’ asked Hope gently.
Barbara nodded. ‘Like a knife, sometimes. But I’m going to use it on the title-page of the book—Bo va; bo kuwa; lame bel; navidze! and I know Nelson would like that.’
‘And be proud of your courage, I should think. Then what will you do when the dictionary is finished and published?’
‘I’ll get a job, I expect. I shall have to, until I see what success it has. Locally, for the tourists and for the schools, it should have some. Further afield, I don’t know, but Craig has some influence in England and America, and he could help it along.’
Craig... Craig. His name appeared almost as a kind of punctuation to much of all that Barbara said, thought Hope. She remembered his kiss of greeting for the other girl; they were evidently close friends—perhaps more?
The place Hope had heard mentioned more than once as ‘town’ was Port Belain, the island’s capital and its port for cruise and merchant ships. The quays were noisy, traffic-choked and hot, but after showing Hope their bustle, Barbara drove into the town down one of several wide boulevards bordered by flowering shrubs and the pounds of luxury hotels.
‘They all have their private swimming-pools,’ said Barbara. ‘They wouldn’t catch the tourist trade if they didn’t as there are no bathing beaches nearer than about six kilometres north and south. But they’re easily reached from Belle Rose; on our way round we’ll take some of them in.’
The streets were all French-named, the main ones running straight back from the harbour to the point inland where the finer, tourist-attracting shops began to give place to tawdry markets and cheap cafes and bars, and the good roads and pavements became rutted highways as they climbed the jagged hills which embraced the coastal area in the great curve of their arms.
Barbara and Hope lunched in the town and afterwards they drove along the coast road, coming upon little fishing hamlets where the beaches were draped with drying nets, and crescent coves, some of them ‘developed’ by the tourist hotels with sun umbrellas and pedalos and snackbars; others more lonely, backed by sprawling tamarisks and with wind-slanted palms and sea-grape trees growing on their untrodden sands almost to the water’s edge.
Barbara named some of them for Hope—Witch Creek, Cove of Desire, Cloud’s Nest Bay—and told her how to reach them from Belle Rose without needing to touch the town.
Though beyond the gentle lap-lap of the lazy surf the sea looked like green silk, the girls hadn’t come prepared to swim, and at about fifteen kilometres out they turned back along the coast road again. On the promenade fronting one of the holiday hotels they had passed earlier, Barbara had to halt the car in traffic, and as they waited she pointed out a car parked with others at the balustrading above the beach. In the driving-seat sat a man, upright and immobile, whom Hope recognised.
‘That’s Madame de Faye’s chauffeur, isn’t it?’ she asked.
‘Yes. Dickon,’ Barbara confirmed. ‘Looks as if Victoire may have come to the beach. If so, perhaps it’s a chance for you to meet her. I’ll park.’
She edged the small car into a space and they went over to the big one. ‘Madame is at the beach?’ she asked Dickon, but he shook his head.
‘Not Madame. I bring Missus Godwin. She just gone down to the beach ’long away—’ He pointed, and following the direction of his finger Hope saw Tina in a white bikini, threading her way between prone sun-bronzed bodies towards the sea. Barbara called to her over the balustrade; she stopped, turned and beckoned, waiting for them to join her.
‘Luxury for some. You get chauffeured even to the beach,’ commented Barbara.
‘Yes, but only until Madame gets a little car for me to drive—so that I can take Crispin around when he comes out. Then I’ll be independent. Where are you going or ha
ve been?’ asked Tina.
‘On a tour, to show Hope the geography, and when we saw the car and Dickon, I thought it might be Victoire here, not you, and I brought Hope to be introduced.’
‘Oh. What’s the hurry?’ Tina sat down and began to oil her arms and legs.
‘No hurry. Just being polite, that’s all.’
‘Well, bring her up to the Great House when I go back. But I’m going to swim first. Are you going to, too?’
‘No, we didn’t bring any gear. And anyway, I prefer somewhere quieter, like Cloud’s Nest or Desire—’ Barbara broke off and looked at her watch. ‘Besides, I ought to get back. I’ve got a woman coming to see about doing for me on one morning a week. So look—if I left Hope with you, and you took her to meet Victoire, could Dickon drive her back afterwards, do you think?’
‘Sure,’ said Tina. ‘But I’m going to have my swim first.’ Revelling in the glorious warmth of the sun, Hope lay down beside her, making a pillow of her head with her crossed arms. ‘Even if it does rain a lot, if you get sun like this in between, I don’t know what you have to grouse about,’ she said.
‘Forgetting, of course, that even when the sun did shine, a wretched wage-slave like me didn’t often get the chance to enjoy it. It’s always seemed to be raining whenever I got off that sadist’s hook.’ Tina paused. ‘Notice, did you, how smoothly Barbara got out of bringing you up to the House to meet Madame de Faye?’
‘ “Got out of”? It was she who suggested introducing us, when she thought Madame was here,’ Hope objected.
‘Sense of duty. Or to get it over with, without having to accept any hospitality.’
‘What makes you say that?’
They don’t get on.’
‘Not? Why not?’
Barbara shrugged and got to her feet. ‘Reasons,’ she said cryptically. ‘I’m going to swim now. Shan’t be long.’ Half an hour later, she was willing to return to the car, and on the drive Hope took her to task for letting her suppose they were both to stay with Barbara for as long as she, Tina, was on the island.
‘Yes, well, I didn’t tell you I was still there,’ said Tina sulkily.
‘Nor that you weren’t,’ Hope retorted. ‘What’s more, I had to hear from Mr. Napier and from Barbara where you were and what were your plans. Anyway, what makes you fancy yourself as a governess to a boy of nine? You don’t know anything about children, and you’ve certainly never had to teach one.’
‘So what? I should hope I can keep ahead of a nine-year-old in arithmetic and reading. Besides, teaching him isn’t really the idea. It’s to keep him off Madame de Faye’s hands as much as anything.’
‘Just while he’s on holiday? I’d have thought she would want to see as much of him as she can before he has to go back.’
Though he may not be going back to Europe. I don’t know. I haven’t been told,’ said Tina.
Dickon turned in off the road up a drive which led to a house built in a very different style from the modern hotels and villas Hope had seen during the day. This mansion was not unlike a French chateau of the eighteenth century, with a long facade of deep windows, the frontage shadowed by a pillared portico the full length of the building. The walls were gleaming white, the roof of mellowed apricot tiling. Oleanders and cacti in big tubs flanked the main doorway. Window-shutters laid back against the walls enhanced the French design.
‘The Great House? It’s lovely,’ Hope commented.
‘Reminds me of something out of Gone With the Wind,’ said Tina as they alighted and Dickon drove the car on to the side of the house and through a high porte-cochere into what was probably a courtyard. ‘Craig Napier has his quarters through there,’ Tina indicated. ‘They’re an extension of the stabling. That’s his car under the wall. Looks as if he’s at home.’
She led the way into a marble-paved hall, divided from an inner hall by decorative wrought-iron trellis. A door stood open to a drawing-room. They crossed this and went through a french window to a terrace where a woman, presumably the lady of the house, lay on a cane sunlounger.
Her brief playdress of white sharkskin had a pleated skirt and a halter-top, knotted at the waist and on each bare shoulder. She was slim and long-legged; her rich auburn hair was piled on her head in a studiedly careless bunch. She did not rise as the girls approached, but merely removed her dark sunglasses and surveyed Hope appraisingly. To Tina she said in English with a trace of accent, ‘You are back? And this—is your cousin? You hadn’t said you were meeting her?’
‘I wasn’t. Craig’—Hope noted Tina’s use of his first name here—‘gave her the first day off, and Barbara drove her round to show her the island. They hailed me at Moule, and I brought her to meet you. Hope—Madame de Faye, my hostess. Of course I have told her about you,’ Tina concluded.
Hope took the hand offered by Victoire de Faye. ‘Welcome to Madenina,’ the latter said mechanically, and to Tina, ‘and Barbara Paul? Did she come up too?’
‘No. She had an engagement at home—’
‘Ah—’ The corner of Victoire’s mouth lifted in the ghost of a smile.
‘So I took the liberty of saying that Dickon would drive Hope back. Was that all right?’ asked Tina.
‘Of course. Sit down, won’t you, Miss Redmond? Or may we call you Hope, as we call Christine Tina? Tina—chairs!’ The last two words were a crisp command which Tina obeyed with alacrity.
They talked as acquaintances, Madame asking about Hope’s flight out and her opinion of such of Madenina as she had seen, and Hope admired the beauty of the house, saying she hadn’t expected such elegance. Craig Napier and Tina’s broken relationship with him was not mentioned; nor was her prospective employment as the boy Crispin’s ‘governess’. But, as in the matter of the chairs, Hope thought there was more than a hint of an employer’s tone in the way Madame said after a while, ‘Tina, the flowers in the salon are half-dead. You’d better get some more before evening—or now, perhaps. Put them in the garden-room and I’ll arrange them when it’s cooler. But not hibiscus—I have told you that it doesn’t last twenty-four hours, have I not?’
‘Yes,’ said Tina, rising.
‘And you could show your cousin the gardens, if she cares to see them. I shall be going to change presently.’
It was a subtle dismissal and Hope took it as such. As she went with Tina her imagination was dressing Victoire de Faye exotically—in evening gowns and furs, and arranging that great swathe of hair into coils and coronets— and acknowledged that Tina’s hostess was a great beauty.
Aloud to Tina she turned this thought into the understatement of, ‘Madame is certainly a looker, isn’t she? And too young for a widow—I shouldn’t think she’s thirty.’
‘Nothing like, I’d say,’ agreed Tina.
Hope was thinking again. ‘What do you suppose she meant when, after she’d asked me if I should be comfortable at Barbara Paul’s, she said, in a meaning sort of way, “And of course it is rather important for Barbara to have someone there with her—as Tina was, and now you”?’ Tina did not reply. She only smiled.
‘Well?’ urged Hope.
‘Well, see yourself as a chaperone, can you? I admit I found it a giggle when Madame suggested that I was one.’
‘A chaperone for Barbara Paul? Why should she need one?’
‘For the usual reason, I suppose—to keep people from talking. Seems, as far as Madame hinted, that when Barbara and her husband lived in town, Craig Napier spent a lot of time at their apartment. Too much time. So that when he moved Barbara out to that cottage it was supposed she was his petite amie, and they could keep their rendezvous out of the public eye.’
‘How perfectly beastly of people!’ exclaimed Hope.
‘It’s not an uncommon thing for men to do,’ Tina shrugged.
‘But only when they’re running a clandestine affair, and there’s no need. Barbara Paul is a widow.’
‘Well, perhaps Craig prefers things the way they are, and as chaperones, when he or she realis
ed people were talking, you and I were heaven-sent—’
‘You don’t know the way things are!’
‘Neither can you,’ Tina capped. ‘But on the evidence—well, didn’t they kiss when he drove you there last night? And you’ll have noticed that he couldn’t wait to get rid of me and Dickon?’
‘Yes, but—’ Hope switched her attack. ‘Anyway, I’m surprised Madame de Faye discussed her manager’s private affairs with you, as his secretary.’
‘Oh, she didn’t, while he employed me. And she hasn’t “discussed” him since—only dropped hints and made it fairly obvious she doesn’t like Barbara Paul.’
‘Doesn’t she like Mr. Napier either?’
Tina pursed her lips. ‘Difficult to say. She must know she couldn’t afford to lose him as her estate manager; I’d say they have a kind of love-hate relationship, and you know where that sometimes leads.’
‘Why, where does it lead?’ countered Hope, not wanting to agree.
‘According to the novelists, wherever the stronger one wants it to lead,’ was Tina’s sententious reply as she reached for some high-blooming yellow allamanda blossoms and added them to the mass of colour in her trug.
When they returned to the house the sun had gone from the terrace and Victoire de Faye had moved back into the salon. Craig Napier was with her. Though he rose when the two girls came in, they went on talking.
Victoire was saying, ‘And you are insisting that I leave it to you?’
‘As you’ve surely understood all along that you must.’ he retorted coolly.
She did not move, but somehow conveyed the air of turning on him. ‘Then why bring to me at all?’ she demanded on an acid note.